Energy cost are dropping, should we care about PC Power Management anymore?

Recently, the cost of oil has dropped significantly (presently under US$50 per barrel – by way of comparison, the same barrel was over US$100 during the summer of 2014) and as a direct result we are seeing the costs associated with the provision of energy to homes and businesses drop. So, given that we are automatically getting cheaper energy provision, do we really need to care about PC power management?

The answer of course is usually “it depends” but typically businesses are not just targeting themselves on their direct operating costs, but also other measurements such as their carbon footprint, as it is common for businesses to have social responsibility directives in place to demonstrate themselves as leaders in environmental and social scenes. The fact that the provision of energy has reduced is of course great news for every business that requires energy, but this alone is not going to help with the carbon footprint reduction or other demonstrations of social and environmental leadership.

1E have been helping businesses reduce their energy spend by approximately US$26 per PC per annum for the last 18 years with some simple, yet incredibly powerful PC Power Management software known as NightWatchman.

NightWatchman is silently installed across the end user computing estate and monitors PC usage which is in turn used in combination with energy cost information to determine accurate operating costs of each and every PC across the estate. Of course, each different model of PC has a different energy burn rate (kWh – Kilowatt hours) and NightWatchman is aware of this and uses data from each PC supplier to ensure that the actual burn rates are accurate to the actual PC’s that are in use across your estate. This data is updated monthly (and securely synchronized into your business from 1E online systems) to ensure that even the most up-to-date hardware is accounted for accurately. Similarly, the business could well be using energy from different suppliers for different offices, each with its own cost model per kWh, again NightWatchman can cater to this to ensure that the data used is all up-to-date and most importantly accurate. Reports from NightWatchman can not only advise you of exact energy spend but also highlight usage patterns of the PC estate which in turn can enable a power policy (or multiple policies) to be implemented across the PC estate that can begin the automated power down of systems across the estate in order to save on energy burn / waste. NightWatchman is usually implemented alongside the 1E WakeUp solution (part of the NightWatchman Enterprise solution) that will subsequently resume the PCs from their slumber at a time that makes the individual PCs available for use just in time so that the user population are utterly unaware that their PC was sleeping while they were out of the office. Similarly WakeUp can be integrated into the PC management solution in the business to ensure that PCs are awoken out of hours (or whenever appropriate) to perform patch management and other maintenance activity to keep the security management function happy that the estate is in optimal condition, automagically.

Now, it is of course quite possible that the cost of oil will surge in the coming months, thus increasing the cost of energy provision, removing all the benefits that we are presently enjoying with regard to the lower cost of operations. In this case, wouldn’t it be pretty handy if we have implemented a simple solution to handle the present waste in energy burn, thus get us into a position that we can actually reduce our energy burn (including associated cost AND carbon footprint) and then be in a position to be able to more accurately predict running costs, while being in a better place when it comes to the management and security of our end user computing?

So, if you could not only benefit from the lowered cost of energy provision, but could further reduce your actual energy usage (and hence associated cost), lowering your carbon footprint along the way, why would this be something that was not of interest to you? If you would like to reduce operating costs, carbon footprint AND increase your End User Computing Management capabilities, why not get in touch and see just what a difference you can make, we would love to help you.